The Wall Street Journal takes a closer look at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey of the religious landscape in the USA. Amidst all the trends and changes between and within religious traditions, they note a much bigger trend. They see “a country filled with dozens of minority religions, expressing diverse beliefs, and doing so free of coercion.”
Some 60% of Americans say religion is “very important” to them. That’s compared with 12% for the French and 25% for the Italians. The study describes a “competitive religious marketplace” in which 84% of Americans claim one of hundreds of religious affiliations — from Pentecostalism and Judaism to Islam and Mormonism.
While they note the 44% of folks who have switched to another religious affiliation from the one they grew up with, the WSJ also notes that:
There are reasons to find this statistic troubling. People who leave one denomination for another may be more concerned with fulfilling their boutique church-going desires than with meeting the moral obligations of a religious group or the demands of a doctrine. That almost a third of respondents also said they were married to someone of a different faith suggests religion has become more a matter of individual conscience than of continuity and tradition.
Yet there is something remarkable about so much religious diversity. Elsewhere in the world, religious difference is often a cause for violence and ostracism. America so honors the principle of religious tolerance that it has brought it into the home. Pew’s statistic about church-switching may be less a sign of spiritual flakiness than an emblem of freedom.
It should be noted that a third of the survey’s “converts” have gone from one Protestant congregation to another. In short, America is not, on the whole, giving up serious worship for the sake of New Age platitudes. Half of Americans who grew up without any religious affiliation adopted one in adulthood. Clearly Americans are still convinced there is a such a thing as religious truth — and it’s worth their time to search for it. Sorry, Mr. Hitchens.
Read: The Wall Street Journal: God’s Country.